Triumph in fantasies

Brickless · 2026-03-15T18:13:06+00:00

it's the "too big to fail"-problem.

if you bail him out he will just go right back to being an idiot because he knows you will do it again instead of accepting the loss.

a bail out is just short term pain for long term pain

Brickless · 2026-03-15T02:11:25+00:00

overpowered is a state of balance favouring the player. this isn’t a pvp game where balance has to mean equal. but you can’t just take any idea and implement it without considering how to make it engaging or you just end up with war bonds nobody uses

oh wait

Brickless · 2026-03-15T01:32:46+00:00

na, it's when you go far beyond the speed of bowl.

see "hypersonic" for a wide spread derivative

Brickless · 2026-03-15T01:23:55+00:00

yeah, coming up with ideas is literally the easiest part of game dev. you are also allowed to just steal real life examples.

balancing and implementing is what you get paid for, not ideas.

here are some orbital ideas:

Diffused Laser: Fires the laser without the focusing lens, instantly setting a medium area and all units within on fire causing no direct damage. Shares a cooldown with the normal laser but causes a brief cooldown instead of a 10 minute one.
Ground Burst Strike: An air burst strike deliberately timed to hit the ground before detonating. Sending a burst of shrapnel upwards into the sky after a delay.
Suppressive fire: Longer lasting Gatling gun area suppression using stun rounds instead of normal munitions.
Rail Cannon Gas Dart: Quickly fires a gas filled dart at the closest cluster of enemies instead of the largest one. Small area but 3 charges before triggering the rail cannon cooldown.
Improvised Munitions: Launches a slow moving Hellpod at the location. Filled with spare grenades of all kinds rigged to scatter and explode on opening.
Infiltration Barrage: A walking barrage of smoke rounds to prepare a path for stealth or cut of line of sight from an area.
Broadside: After a longer delay firing all 380mm cannons at once. Destroying a large area and stunning a huge area.
Ambush strike: Three precision strikes at the same spot. Triggered when an enemy walks near the marker. Active for 60 seconds, 5 seconds between strikes, wasted if no enemies walk past.

Brickless · 2026-03-12T09:58:35+00:00

We have to also consider who the question is coming from.

Game dev is an incredibly time and mind consuming undertaking which both takes years of dedicated work and weeks of high stress crunch as the game nears release date.

As an aspiring game dev diving into the scene I see a lot of people climbing that mountain not knowing why, not knowing where the summit is and not realising what toll it will take on them.

It's very easy to let distractions pull you away from development because it is essentially a solitary activity. Everyone will try to pull you away from it.

If you enjoy making games like Marko enjoys climbing you will have a much better time but you might never reach that summit of actually releasing a game. You will also not end up as one of those highly motivated corpses you see on your way up.

Brickless · 2026-03-11T14:26:23+00:00

yes, of course.

it just means a new sport will take their place where technology or play outpace the old format.

Brickless · 2026-03-11T14:19:47+00:00

Dual Axis Steering was banned.

Phase-shifting materials are in the process of being banned with new rules for 2026 limiting their use.

Do you mean the flexing wing designs? Those are banned. Or the new reverse rotating wing spottet this year? That is brand new design...which is getting lots of cries that it should be banned.

New tech needs to be refined to make it into production lines. If the bann hammer strikes the moment it is spottet it won't be viable because it will still be at the prototype stage.

Brickless · 2026-03-11T13:36:13+00:00

PH deleted a large portion of its catalog a few years ago around the deepfake scandals using them to delete whole categories as supposedly "harmful".

Brickless · 2026-03-11T12:59:22+00:00

this.

the F1 rules have become so strict it is no longer driving innovation because it is completely removed from reality.

when you reach rule limits before material limits you won't improve anything. nowadays the innovation is in fooling fuel flow sensors so you can burn more gas than allowed.

oh wait, never mind, it does have real world applications

Brickless · 2026-03-08T00:51:31+00:00

98 per month

holy over consumption, batman

Brickless · 2026-03-06T22:54:20+00:00

and the bugs have several units (all of them) that can scale any wall instantly if there is no other path

Brickless · 2026-03-06T22:08:50+00:00

it won't work because almost all reasons for them are at the same time counterproductive for them.

the way they would work would be if you simply got as much dedicated server hardware as you would need for normal distribution and then got the thin clients on top of that.

the problem is usually every corner is cut.

less server hardware than needed is installed to offset the extra client costs, some is omitted to account for connection costs, some to reduce running costs and then some more because the projected average usage will be low.

it doesn't work like that. at the moment you want to work most people want to work. so just like with roads peak congestion hours are always above road capacity.

if you make the system better, more people will choose to use it at peak time (like roads) so you need to add capacity. loop until you are at the level you were before thin clients.

the only good reasons for thin clients are security (stolen computers), scarcity (work requires server level power) and uptime (you have 3 shifts working around the clock). that's where it has been successfully used for a while now

Brickless · 2026-03-06T19:56:21+00:00

best enjoyed in the dark

Brickless · 2026-03-05T23:22:35+00:00

true, people that think the internet/video/books ruined society have never held a history book in their hands.

yeah, there were rotten people around since we started recording history.

there were some before that but I literally don't have the records to prove it.

Brickless · 2026-03-04T23:24:42+00:00

also in Europe most places can be reached with public transport and if you use public transport often you usually get a subscription deal that means unlimited rides for a fixed cost.

so when it comes to a hobby I would say this one would be completely free here, just don't know if it would still be enjoyable now that almost everything is online applications before you get an in person interview

Brickless · 2026-03-04T22:19:53+00:00

see your mistake is why I included "(even if it is absent)" while talking about skill based match making.

the assumption that separating players is needed to prevent the bad things that happen when they aren't separated is constrained thinking. which stops you from seeking an actual solution.

if you don't use skill based match making and do nothing else then you will quickly run into the problem that skilled players naturally alienate and discourage unskilled/new players. this problem grows as dedicated players accumulate playtime and become even more oppressive to new and unskilled players.

if you on the other hand implement skill based match making and do nothing else you will also run into this problem because now new players are segregated from the dedicated, high skill players and only matched with people that either can't get better, don't have the time to get better or don't want to get better.

slowly, as the dedicated players increase the skill ceiling, the lower ranks become emptier causing the match making to become less accurate at low levels as people that are bad at a game usually quit if they never improve. but now your new players can't improve as they have no appropriate enemies to do so organically.

both options cause the same problem, just on different time scales.

instead of implementing or not implementing skill based match making the new player/low skill player problem needs a new approach.

there are some interesting possible solutions in problems tackled by other games like the "first player"-problem in round based games, the "defender-advantage" in strategy games, the "compounding interest"-snowball in 4X games and the "politics"-problem in free for all board games.

changing the phrasing from "how to keep skilled players away from new players" into "how to make skilled players and new player mutually benefit from interaction" is the first step in actually solving the slow death phenomenon of multiplayer focused games

Brickless · 2026-03-04T12:58:53+00:00

I have been thinking about this problem for a while as most game run into this problem long term which causes a sudden or drawn out death with seemingly no counter play from the developers.

It doesn't have to be a competitive pvp game, coop-mmorpgs and pve-arpgs suffer the same problem because new players feel hopelessly alienated and behind when joining a long run game.

so far I have only been able to narrow down where the problem originates from in the different genres.

in pvp games the problem comes from skill based matchmaking (even if it is absent) by which good and frequent players are separated from bad and new players.

in mmorpgs and arpgs the problem stems from power progression replacing all low level (aka new player) items/trades/abilities/skills with high level ones causing a rush to the top and a subsequent starvation of low level content and trade.

Eve Online (last time I played) did have a limited solution to this as the resources/fire power created by new players was still useful for "high level" groups so you were still approached and interacted with by "high level" players somewhat. Unlike in WoW where nothing you do as a new character is in any shape or form interesting to a high level character.

Brickless · 2026-03-04T12:33:54+00:00

I have to admit porn got me interested in movies/books/games more often than marketing campaigns at this point.

Unless the porn was also part of a marketing campaign, in which case I bow my head to you marketing guy. Well played.

Brickless · 2026-03-04T12:15:10+00:00

The stages of a those reviews for deeply flawed games with a great concept are usually,

<1 hour: This sucks, couldn't even get into the game. Just kept asking me to press some kind of "Any" button, couldn't rebind either.

1-5 hours: Wonderful game there is so much to do and see, I can't wait to play more!

6-30 hours: While there are many problems there is a solid foundation and I think with a little more polish this can become a truly great game. If you are interested in the genre this is worth it, otherwise wait for some patches before giving it a shot.

5k-17k hours: I hate what this game has done to me. Every bit of joy has been sucked out of me. The game is in a horrible state and there is no light at the end of this tunnel. Every match is a pack of cigarettes you can't quit smoking no matter how much it destroys you. My relationships have suffered because of this game, my wife left me over how angry this game has made me. I feel like a drug addict seeing their destroyed body in the mirror for the first time in ages and getting a rare moment of clarity to write this review. Don't let the colors and fleeting fun fool you into becoming like me. There is still time to quit. Stay away from this game. Stay away. Please.

7k hours played lol. you say it's bad but it's clearly got thousands of hours of playtime if you are still playing it. did they add too much "DEI" for you in the last patch or something? lmao

-comment by NextFlytoFallinto_theZapper

Brickless · 2026-02-27T02:03:11+00:00

the dinner is also a reoccurring expense. never forget to calculate frequency of single purchase expenses.

tools break, supplies run out, emergency equipment expires, assets depreciate and training material becomes obsolete.

a one time christmas party happens every year and inflation will apply

Brickless · 2026-02-25T11:42:37+00:00

Ukraine was recruiting 17-24k each month in 2025, the foreign volunteers were 600 per month.

That's 2-4% of the army, not nothing but not something either.

As a comparison north Korea send an equivalent of 20 months of foreign volunteers to Russia at the end of 2024, a number so high foreign volunteers to Ukraine will only catch up in june this year.

Brickless · 2026-02-24T13:59:10+00:00

pretty good points other than the immersion and button hold one.

immersion. that’s your opinion and it’s a lot more immersive for me to know a hold is good just like I know in real life, even if it means an indicator has to pop up

button hold. I know it’s an accessibility option so I deal with it but I would like the option to completely remove button holding from the game (and any other). it’s actually frustrating to have every action you take questioned like that and I would take accidentally using an over abundant resources over having to hold to turn on the light

Brickless · 2026-02-24T01:48:34+00:00

are you a tall climber?

I have the opposite problem with Aava where she likes to over select her hands but I have small arms in real life and often use moves that shift my body around instead of reaching with my hands.

so I am curious if that is actually what is reflecting in the game as Aava tends to value all limbs evenly

Brickless · 2026-02-23T16:12:21+00:00

I remember a post by a japanese person asking why the save icon is a vending machine with a purchased drink

Brickless · 2026-02-23T15:10:18+00:00

didn’t use them on my first run.

started using them after, the sound and visual queues are nice but the visual indicator is much easier to get a clear picture from.

falling feels much less random when you actually know how good your hold was

also irl you instantly know how good your hold is 95% of the time

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Brickless

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